The Declaration of Helsinki and research in vulnerable populations

Topics

Mooted changes to the Declaration on the agenda of the World Medical
Association have sparked a vigorous debate on international
research issues. The medical, research and ethics communities in
Australia need to participate more broadly in this debate.

The Nuremberg Code, which was formulated to prevent a recurrence of
the horrific medical experiments carried out on humans during World
War II, is unwavering in its commitment to the primacy of the human
subject. It states that any person who is a research participant
"should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice"
and that "(t)he experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results
for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of
study, and not random and unnecessary in nature."1

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